Latest on Lillian

Are you folks ready for my latest Lillian update?
Lillian has had an iPad for a few years and (God help me) I have supported her even though I don't have one myself. I always told her though if it's a major issue she has to contact Apple or the ISP - I won't spend a lot of time on something of limited value to anyone else.
Anyway Lillian's iPad had (she says) developed some strange problems with connectivity and crashes. She contacted the ISP and they told her maybe a new tablet should be in her future. So she bought the absolutely top of the line iPad Pro - 12.9 inch screen. This is the technical equivalent of the Little Old Lady from Pasadena and her Shiny Red Super Stock Dodge.
I spent a couple of hours setting it up for her. It really is a beautiful piece of kit. Got her online, email and browsers working, Facebook and all the Crappware she had previously downloaded installed.
Today she called and said she had already totally borked the iPad. I was ready to tell her to take it back to Apple.
Turns out she accepted an update which started iCloud - Apple's new backup and restore service. As part of the install it asked her for credit card info in case she actually wanted to BUY an app someday. Lillian freaked out because she isn't allowed to do any financial stuff online. So naturally the whole iPad went pear-shaped as far as she was concerned.
I dismissed a couple of screens, the iPad started normally and within 20 seconds Lillian was happily playing Mindless Mountain Slots or whatever her favorite gambling game is. No money involved of course.
I told her iCloud was OK - it has replaced iTunes as Apple's way to restore lost data. "But I didn't have it on my old iPad." "Yes but this isn't your old iPad."
So now you know the rest of the Lillian story. For the moment.

Hmm... sounds a bit like me over at my uncle's house today trying to explain to the nearly 91 year old how is Frontier FIOS TV and phone work, and why I cannot just check to see if the "wire" somewhere is broken.

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RAY!!! It's good to see you. We've been wondering where you'd run off to this past couple months. I even posted an AWOL thread about you around here somewhere. Good to see all is well in your world.

I'm sure you'll never run out of Lillian stories. Thanks for the laughs.

As far as tv, when boxes started being required and remotes with more buttons, my mom who had poor eyesight would end up pressing a wrong button and lose the tv. We were at least an hour away (on a good drive day) so she'd have to wait for our weekly visit then my husband would call the cable company and find out what we had to do to get the tv working again. We don't have the same cable company, set top box or same type tv. Once we figured out what was needed, I'd try and write a note in very large dark print for my mom so she could try and fix it herself. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

When we moved her at age 92 to assisted living, she ended up with a different cable company and this one, at that time, still didn't require set top boxes. We bought her a new larger flat screen tv but then I had to shop for a remote with large buttons so she could operate the new tv. I did find one. Phew. One problem solved.

Manufacturers need to realize that older people can't see light gray print on black hardware devices!

We had a terrible time trying to find a big button phone and answering machine combo in white.

My neighbor across the way (age 85) could not get his wife's laptop connected to the Internet. I checked and found that the laptop's wifi adapter was switched off. One touch on the keyboard fixed it.

My wife's friend clicked on one of those "Diane Sawyer is dead" posts on Facebook and got a lovely annoying fake virus site that she couldn't escape - looping audio track blasting away. I had to kill the browser in Task Manager and then I ran CCleaner to get rid of the browser history. I installed the Web Of Trust browser extension to avoid such problems in future - assuming she pays attention to the warnings.

More evidence that my neighborhood's Windows users are not ready for prime time.

Well Lillian is back in trouble. She has one of those scareware web pages blocking her iPad. I have to go over later and see if I can clear things up.
I told her she can't really get hacked or get a virus on an iPad so this is mostly just annoying. She's freaked out and has no knowledge of how to go into the iPad task manager and kill a process. Also she goes to bad websites so I can see this happening again. I don't think there's anything you can do to put anti-malware anti-phishing software on an iPad.
I shouldn't be supporting iPads but the alternative is to drive into Ottawa and pay some dweeb at the Apple Store to fix it. My plan is to kill wifi with Airplane Mode. Stop the browser (Chrome) and then figure out how to clear the History and Cache.

Got Lillian sorted out. As I expected she had scareware. The guys who make this stuff are so dumb it claimed to be a Windows virus on her iPad.
She had managed to infect two different browsers with bad webpages - Chrome and Puffn. I got them both cleared and the iPad functioning again and she's happy. I also spent some time cleaning up her laptop with cCleaner. She keeps complaining it's slow,
Not much I can do really. It never was the fastest machine anyway but she's running so much startup crap - Skype, HP bloatware, and a complete Norton Security suite - it's a wonder the laptop can even function.
She was also complaining that Facebook wouldn't allow her to clean it up with her Norton Utilities app. I have no idea what she means.